The Mandeville -author’s sense of space: a digital–ecological reading of Mandeville’s Travels

Combining digital and eco-critical analyses, this essay argues that in the Middle English version of Mandeville’s Travels, authorial emphasis on the topographical and theological centrality of Jerusalem forms the ideological keynote. Nevertheless, the overarching tendency of constructing the Holy City within the framework of composing a Christocentric universal history coincides with occasional shifts of authorial attention to the prospering civilizations in the non-Christian East (e.g. Cathay, India, and Arabia), which corresponds to some temporary and local centres of the fourteenth-century world system. In the Travels, the Mandeville-author’s sentiments of Christocentric universalism are conveyed primarily through spatial narrative. But dialectically, authorial acknowledgement and veneration of the East as an economically, technologically, and morally more advanced existence can also be extrapolated from the Mandevillian descriptions of the world. Confronted with the dual discourse, this essay endeavours to conduct a four-dimensional digital analysis grounded in the use of Geographical Information System and Computational Linguistics. It aims to further investigate the Mandeville-author’s Janus-faced world-view, as embodied by and reflected from their interlaced centralizing and de-centralizing narratives of Latin Christendom throughout the Travels. Consisting of frequency analysis, geographical visualization, directionality analysis, and verb–preposition analysis, the case study here exemplifies the Mandeville-author’s deeply entangled geospatial and ecological concerns that are elusive to traditional close reading. It also renders a fine-grained picture of the dynamics between cosmopolitan and Christocentric sentiments in the Mandeville-author’s cognitive mapping of the world.